HUY, NAMUR
In 44 C.C.S. – In a ward with a mixed crowd of French, Russian, Italian, & Belgians. – Put on light diet, owing to short rations. – Missed evacuation in A.M. & about due to go crazy when they decided to send me to NAMUR in a car that had come up. – It’s a shame to leave a beautiful part of the country like this but I don’t feel fit to trek thru it in the winter, so here I am in 48 C.C.S. marked for evac.
Robertson's final entry puts him in a hospital ward with "a mixed crowd of French, Russian, Italian, & Belgians", five nations under one roof, three weeks after the fighting stopped. The rest of the entry is about missing a morning evacuation ("about due to go crazy") and being sent on to Namur instead, "a shame to leave a beautiful part of the country like this," he writes, "but I don't feel fit to trek thru it in the winter." Robertson had gone down with influenza on November 19, and most of the men around him were likely there for the same reason, the pandemic moving through the Allied armies that autumn, without regard for nationality.
December 2, 1918 is Robertson's last entry, written mid-recovery, in a hospital ward in Namur. He never marks it as an ending. There's no reflection on the war, no final word on the four years behind him, just the same practical notes he'd been keeping all along, and then nothing more.
What's known of the rest comes from other sources. His official Record of Service shows him posted that February to Khaki University, an education program for Canadian soldiers awaiting repatriation, and sailing for Canada on September 20, 1919. He completed a civil engineering degree at McGill in 1921, spent his career at the Bell Telephone Company of Canada, returned to uniform as a Major in the Second World War, and died in 1971.